I originally grew up in the Midwest, about an hour north of Detroit, and moved out to Utah about four years ago for work and lifestyle changes. I was getting frustrated where I was living originally, just doing the same stuff. I knew that means a change lifestyle and Utah seemed like it was it. Since I've been out here, I've gone into a lot of the outdoor sports doing mountain biking, rock climbing, skiing a lot, and into like a small network community, that's ice hockey community actually out here so then a good trip moving from Michigan to Utah. But other than that, I haven't really lived elsewhere outside of Michigan. I lived there 26 years of my life. I definitely traveled a lot for my work previously but didn't really live anywhere. Yeah, Not your typical Utahan, of course.

It varies on what you're doing within the company or in Engineering III role. Most engineers are now used as a project engineer. They have you run various level of projects. For myself, I end up running a capital budget of about a million dollars, so I end up doing some installation of pipeline facilities throughout the system. I'll actually go from birth of the project, identifying what the project is, all the way through completion and commissioning of it. That's about a third of what I do for the company. Then I also provide them technical expertise. I give help write and provide recommendations on standard practices and other people's projects, and troubleshooting of the system to make sure the systems operating correctly and safely.

Some of the things that I really like about my job is when you're running projects, you always have something different going on normally. As much as it seems like you're going to always have the exact same problems, there ends up being a large variation in what the projects are, I find that a lot of interesting because it's just the always changing environment. I really like the troubleshooting side of my job. I get to actually get out in the field. There's not a lot of positions out there that you get as an undergrad where you're out in the field and actually doing physical testing. As an engineer, a lot of times you just tell people what to do as opposed to actually get them to do something. That's pretty fun. That's pretty common with energy industries too. I find my friends I know that worked in oil and gas, they enjoy the exact same thing. They really like the fact that they actually get to go and to get their hands into whatever they're doing and not necessarily just sit in the office and type on a computer. I had a lot of issues to overcome in the last like year and a half. When I first took the job out here in Utah, I had a mentor and my director was a mentor to me and he was kind of our leading subject matter expert on a lot of the pipeline integrity corrosion work that we do in my group. When he left the company, I started finding across my desk a lot of things that were coming across as now that I would subject matter expert just like these folks, didn't necessarily know more information. I just was now the expert because there was no one else to do it. Really, that has happened to me become a little bit more humble and approaching a little bit differently because just because someone's telling you that you're an expert, doesn't mean you are an expert so you need to still go through all the right passages and reach out and ask for help from people and really ask even the person that's telling you that you're the expert, what do they think. A lot of times, they might actually know more than about the problem that they're addressing than you do so they will end up helping you solve your problems a lot of times.